BTW, while Google Desktop has to be one of the most creepy apps I have ever witnessed (privacy invading potential), I’m going to use it at work. The combined gmail + outlook email preview is worth it alone.

It looks like true conservatives are growing further and further disheartened by President Bush’s policies. Maybe the negatives are finally overcoming the cognitive dissonance (Tatteredcoat) that has been the only explanation, to me, for their denial of the facts, for so long. We need more folks seeing clearly – and we need it now:

It’s time for us conservatives to face facts. George W. Bush has pissed away the conservative moment by pursuing a war of choice via policies that border on the criminally incompetent. We control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and (more-or-less) the judiciary for one of the few times in my nearly 5 decades, but what have we really accomplished? Is government smaller? Have we hacked away at the nanny state? Are the unborn any more protected? Have we really set the stage for a durable conservative majority?

“Our troops know that they’re fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to protect their fellow Americans from a savage enemy,” Bush said in his weekly radio address. {Ed: Full text here}

“They know that if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets, and they know that the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war,” he said.

I guess that’s all he has left. After all, if Iraq’s alleged WMD programs were the casus belli, why aren’t we at war with Iran and North Korea? Not to mention Pakistan, which remains the odds-on favorite to supply the Islamofascists with a working nuke. If Saddam’s cruelty to his own people was the casus belli, why aren’t we taking out Kim Jong Il or any number of other nasty dictators? Indeed, what happened to the W of 2000, who correctly proclaimed nation building a failed cause and an inappropriate use of American military might? And why are we apparently going to allow the Islamists to write a more significant role for Islamic law into the new Iraqi constitution? If throwing a scare into the Saudis was the policy, so as to get them to rethink their deals with the jihadists, which has always struck me as the best rationale for the war, have things really improved on that front?

The trouble with Bush’s justification for the war is that it uses American troops as fly paper.

Can it be done? Will you get fired? How do you avoid getting fired? An article published in the Inquirer features “Philly’s most influential blogger”, and Philly Future team volunteer, Scott McNulty and the experience he has had working at he University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School while writing the terrific Blankbaby. Check out what he has to say here.

It sounds like Google will have a big week. From PaidContent.com comes news that Google might release their IM client this Wednesday and along with that PaidContent.com says that the new Google Desktop beta approaches mini-OS functionality (wow – check the hype) with widgets for weather, stocks, news and more. To me this looks like like their Yahoo! Widgets competitor. As with Yahoo! Widgets, it comes with an API to build your own plug-ins. Among the included ones is “Webclips” – a RSS/Atom reader. Related: USAToday article. Looks like there is some predictive personalization going on. I gotta check this out.